The Pirate Bay's 'Move' To Korea Was a Prank 142
judgecorp writes "The Pirate Bay's announcement that it was moving to North Korea was a prank, making fun of gullible readers. Admitting the hoax, the site said 'You can't seriously cheer the 'fact' that we moved our servers to bloody North Korea. Applauds to you who told us to f*** off. Always stay critical. Towards everyone!'"
The essence of a good troll: so absurd it could just be true.
North Korea (Score:2)
Re:North Korea (Score:4, Funny)
Why did the submarines have screen doors? To keep the fish out!
I'm sure that Poland is thrilled that NK has taken over their long worn mantle.
full disclosure: there is a lot of Polish peasantry among the branches of my family tree.
Re:North Korea (Score:5, Funny)
Did you hear about Kim Jong dying? I hadn't heard that he was il.
Re:North Korea (Score:5, Funny)
Re:North Korea (Score:5, Insightful)
The real joke is that many of the site users apparently cheered the "move". Apparently forced labor concentration camps, widespread torture, arbitrary arrest and murder of citizens by the government, collective punishment for entire families and villages, complete absence of freedom of speech, no independent media, death penalty listening to foreign radio are bad, but not as bad as IP laws that prevent you from downloading stuff you want for free.
Re:North Korea (Score:4, Funny)
I wasn't sure who to side with but I'm ready to admit that NK is a bit worse than the MPAA/RIAA.
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Why are you taking sides?
Why can't we just accept that just because a government is batshit crazy doesn't mean that some of their policies are actually ok. Following on that premise why can't we then exploit those policies to counteract some of the stupid decisions of other governments?
When did the issue become all or nothing? There's plenty of hate to spread around to all governments.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KTsXHXMkJA [youtube.com]
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I wasn't aware any of the above was bad.
Did your god tell you it was?
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I take it you haven't heard about their "three generations rule"? If you do something deserving of a concentration camp, they also send your parents, siblings, and children along.
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Yeah. Those *AA bastards are real bastards.
Wait, what? You're saying that that's what NK does? Huh. I'da sworn that was more like the pigopolists.
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Only seems fair. They wouldn't want you to be lonely.
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I can't bereive you didn't go you that obrious one!
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in a household, this is exactly what the MPAA does. Everyone is guilty.
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Wait, are you describing North Korea, or Saudi Arabia, or various South and Central American countries? You know, because The US and Europe are not really against those things if they think they can get free stuff from them.
Re:North Korea (Score:5, Informative)
The real joke is that many of the site users apparently cheered the "move". Apparently forced labor concentration camps, widespread torture, arbitrary arrest and murder of citizens by the government, collective punishment for entire families and villages, complete absence of freedom of speech, no independent media, death penalty listening to foreign radio are bad, but not as bad as IP laws that prevent you from downloading stuff you want for free.
Red herring much?
Cheering a move to NK doesn't imply cheering human rights abuses.
The cheering was for no other reason that the Pirate Bay was moving to a country that would not give a rat's ass what the U.S. or EU thought about copyright law and file sharing, nothing more. It is possible to hold mutually exclusive opinions on these two topics last time I checked.
Re:North Korea (Score:4, Funny)
Indeed your argument is true.
I don't agree with countries that torture, hold extraordinary renditions, run black concentration camps, indiscriminate murder other countries citizens, incarcerate its innocent citizens or bankrupt them to protect corporate larceny, but I do host my sites there.
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Why does moving your servers to North Korea somehow imply your support for their government? All it would do is cause the US to hate them even more (if that's possible). So you're just exploiting the dictatorship, perhaps bringing it's end a bit closer (an extra server would cost them what? 20% of their national power supply?)
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For Internet kiddies "fascism" is when mum and dad tell them to move out to their own place and get a job to pay the rent, and then the RIAA tells them they need to pay for HBO and movies rather than just downloading them for free.
The idea that there's a actual holocaust happening on the other side of the world is far beyond their comprehension, hence the irritating "North Korea is the Best Korea" meme.
Spoiled little shits.
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The real joke is that many of the site users apparently cheered the "move". Apparently forced labor concentration camps, widespread torture, arbitrary arrest and murder of citizens by the government, collective punishment for entire families and villages, complete absence of freedom of speech, no independent media, death penalty listening to foreign radio are bad, but not as bad as IP laws that prevent you from downloading stuff you want for free.
Guess what? Dennis Rodman. Guess what? You know. Guess what? It's the same here. Guess what? Politics. Guess what?
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As a Scandinavian I got the joke, and found articles on the fake routing. I'm not sure, but I read most comments that didn't read like an 11-year old as playing along with the joke.
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Anything, anything at all to get information into that country is a very good thing.
Ageed. However, this move would not have contributed to such a goal. Not at all.
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Somebody, mod the parent up. I'd also add that Canada and most of Europe are in the same boat.
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There's a saying in Norwegian diplomacy, 'always keep talking'. Why? Because it allows for the elements in a society who want change, to actually effect that change.
How did that work out for you in WWII?
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probably not as bad as every single war you have lost since.
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probably not as bad as every single war you have lost since.
I don't know who you think 'you' is, since a moment's reading of my comment history would tell you I'm not an American.
Still one think the UK and US have in common is that they have not been occupied for hundreds of years. Part of the reason for that is that historically they have been willing to kill people in huge numbers to keep that from happening.
Talking is nice and all but they only way to get rid of scourges like National Socialism is carpet bombing, not talking. If we'd have kept talking we would ha
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Yea right WWII, love that reference. If you would study history you would learn that the US had a very strong isolationist policy. It joined in the war very late and it is a piece of cake to wage a war when the battleground is not in the same location as your factories. WWII was easy for the US, the US had 2 years to prepare. The Norwegians had to fight, totally unprepared and on their own ground.
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The Norwegians had to fight, totally unprepared and on their own ground.
Sounds like a good reason for fighting totalitarianism when it's on the other side of the world to be honest. I.e. an interventionist foreign policy like the US and UK have. If you leave until it threatens you with invasion, you're likely invaded like Norway or forced into moral dubious fellow traveller status like Sweden did with Germany in WWII and Russia did with Sweden afterwards.
Norway clearly learned its lesson (unlike Sweden) - that's the reason it joined the US and UK in NATO post WWII.
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Neither have they.
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Starvation jokes aside, they used to export food to China until maybe about the 1970s when an even more insane industrialisation effort than the 1920s-30s USSR one changed them into a country that cannot feed itself.
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Fellow Polak here.
I always wondered why Polish jokes exist. When in fact, the Poles were the ones who first cracked the Enigma code (The Engigma machine was based on a commerical encoder for banks) - the English continued the work but they would never have been able to do what they did without the Poles (U571, or whatever that shitty movie was called, was pure horseshit entertainment. ).
They better vodka than the Russians.
The jokes are because of envy?
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Re:North Korea (Score:4, Informative)
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I always thought it had something to do with the fact that Poland still had a horse-mounted cavalry at the beginning of WWII.
Except the Wehrmacht was itself largely reliant on horses for logistical transport and reconnaissance throughout the war, especially during the beginning years. In fact, on the Western Front both the Germans and Soviets used mounted troops regularly.
I think you meant Eastern Front :-)
Re:North Korea (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, the truth was that that never happened. Polish cavalry were dragoons (that mans they rode horses to battle, then got down off the nags and fought like innfantry), just like every other cavalry force still extent then (USSR used them, for example).
It should also be noted that there were more horses in use by the Wehrmacht than the Poles. 90+% of German "prime movers" were draft horses, not trucks/tractors.
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I always thought it had something to do with the fact that Poland still had a horse-mounted cavalry at the beginning of WWII. Hitler famously staged a fake cavalry attack to justify invading Poland. I think that image of Polish cavalry charging across the border with their swords raised toward's Hitler's tanks has resonated through the ages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWezYFUTn-4 [youtube.com]
In polish, but you can tell by picture alone whats going on
basically myth is this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWezYFUTn-4&t=32s [youtube.com]
reality looked more like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWezYFUTn-4&t=5m49s [youtube.com]
Polish Army even had rifles what easily penetrated early German WW2 tanks armor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wz._35_anti-tank_rifle [wikipedia.org]
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Polish jokes were a staple of my childhood, and I like to think it's because they were considered inoffensive-- we didn't really think that being anti-Polish was a thing (we'd never encountered anyone who really hated Poles), so we figured no one was hurt by them. It was like making fun of Belgians, or something.
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It's the telephone company that's behind all the polack jokes.
They're always driving Poles into the ground.
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The jokes started long before WWII. Blue and Gray Laughing [amazon.com], a book about the humor of soldiers during the American Civil War, has a number of them scattered throughout (end shameless plug for a book written by my relative).
During the war, the "Dutch", a catch-all term for Germanic and similar-enough-to-Germanic-that-Americans-didn't-care European immigrants (Germans, Dutch, Finns, etc.) were generally derided by both sides. Their communities seemed generally disinterested in the war, and their corps in th
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It's very possible that the Poles got swept up in that sentiment, though Polish immigration to the US really didn't kick into gear until decades later.
Yes. Im sure it was all because of people like Kociuszko (hint : Kociuszko's Monument in West Point)
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Why would you need to leave a screen door open? A closed screen door would have the same effect.
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NK, the butt of the world's jokes.
How about... NK, the butt of the world.
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Both are irrelevant.
What we could discuss instead is the viability of North Korea as a server hosting country.
Given that one of Korean family names is "Ping", I'd say they are pretty well positioned.
Re:North Korea (Score:5, Funny)
As in, "I was going to move my server farm to North Korea, but the Ping count is just way too high."
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FTFY
Oh really? (Score:3, Funny)
Well I don't believe you.
Whew! (Score:2)
Thank the Robolords for that!
A day of mourning in North Korea (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A day of mourning in North Korea (Score:5, Funny)
Stop the presses! Kim Jong Un has just announced that Gnome founder Miguel de Icaza is moving to North Korea to head their complete IT move to Apple platforms. Kim's statement read: "We like Apple and their approach. We, of all people, GET IT. The customer must be fully managed, just as we fully manage our freedom-loving citizens."
Re:A day of mourning in North Korea (Score:5, Funny)
in other words (Score:2)
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They're just a bunch of kids, and no need to trust them.
Yep. Nice to see our culture is marginalizing itself as it struggles in a fight for legitimacy.
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This is what is most disappointing. It's hard to take people seriously when they're pulling childish pranks like this. And there are a lot of issues regarding copyright and piracy that we *should* be taking seriously and debating. Stunts like this are annoying distractions, and only strengthen the RIAA/MPAA and its ilk.
Re:in other words (Score:5, Funny)
This is what is most disappointing. It's hard to take people seriously when they're pulling childish pranks like this. And there are a lot of issues regarding copyright and piracy that we *should* be taking seriously and debating. Stunts like this are annoying distractions, and only strengthen the RIAA/MPAA and its ilk.
Read: "I totally fell for it."
You know what makes it really hard to take someone seriously? When the get all butthurt because they didn't get the joke.
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Could be worse. I could have used terms like "butthurt" in my response.
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Stellar comeback, Little Johnny.
Got any other playground gems to bandy about?
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It's an organization dedicated to subverting the law and what made you not trust them was an absurd prank about moving their servers to North Korea?
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It wasn't against the law when they started it. The laws were made after the fact.
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The meaning is found is increasing awareness of injustice. Actually suffering the punishment is beside the point. If an unconstitutional law is passed and you deliberately violate it so you can appeal all the way to the supreme court and have it overturned... and are successful, they don't lock you up afterward.
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Basic logic fail. Go look up the fallacy, "Denying the antecedent."
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They're just a bunch of kids, and no need to trust them.
You forgot to tell them to get off your lawn.
Damn you, Alzheimers!
Someone tell the RIAA/MPAA (Score:2)
They've already put the pressure on China to sanction North Korea [csmonitor.com].
Wherever The Pirate Bay goes next, watch out! They might just invade!
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Slashdot "editors" who are so dumb they fell for the Photoshopped mardi gras beads on Mars picture.
You think they actually saw the pictures?
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the bar for intelligence of the Slashdot editors is pretty low.
It's an ADA compliance thing.
Great Red Blistering Onions! (Score:2)
Wrong destination (Score:2)
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I don't know if that was intentional, but I choose to believe it was for the hilarity.
Really (Score:2)
Are pirates really so odd that piracy is completely ok but move a server to a communist dickhead county and it's fuck you pirate bay.
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Not really all that odd, when you consider their philosophy is that since software is not a tangible good, it is impossible to steal (copies aren't stolen, because the original is still there).
Besides, even if they did see it as theft, it still wouldn't be that odd that thieves would take a moral stance against despotic, iron-fisted dictators. "No honour among thieves," and all.
What I find odd is the fallacy of equivocation, i.e. stealing software is morally the same as forced labor and state-sanctioned mur
The truth was just as odd (Score:3)
Not just a simple prank (Score:5, Informative)
because they applied some BGP trickery to have the IP resolve in NK
https://rdns.im/the-pirate-bay-north-korean-hosting-no-its-fake [rdns.im]
Truth in Absurdity (Score:2)
This is almost as absurd as the rumor that floated around yesterday that Obama held a candlelight vigil at the White House in honor of Hugo Chavez. A lot of people ate it up and went into orbit... then it was revealed to be a hoax... except some people apparently showed up at the White House, candles in hand, and had a vigil for him anyway out on the street and put pictures of it on various social media.
Kinda the odd, self-fulfilling hoax I guess.
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Was it organized by Sean Penn and Danny Glover?
Dennis Rodman (Score:1)
Okay (Score:2)
Always stay critical. Towards everyone!
Okay, that second statement isn't a sentence.
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Don't mod parent down. Parent is most glorious first post ever. Dear Leader has cleverly disguised as "Anonymous Coward" and controls most of Slashdot. All hail!
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